Module VII

Explain:

This module gave me some perspective on how climate change affects people in rural Alaska and how they might interact with western scientists studying climate change.  Elders can teach teens traditional knowledge about plants, and western scientists can teach them how to monitor the health of the plant populations.  However, it's not like the elders haven't already been monitoring populations.  They've just been doing it differently.  They've been in a given area much longer than the researchers so they have information about climate patterns over many seasons.  As a teenager in one of the TD videos said, the arctic is their home, not just a site for field studies.

Something else from this module that intrigued me was the information about the big bang.  I had no idea that we could detect remnant microwaves from this event.  The fact that we have this piece of visible evidence for something that happened so long ago is pretty amazing.

I was curious to learn what other cultures might believe about how the universe was created, so I looked up some creation stories from different countries.  My favorite was one from China where a being called P'an Ku hatches from a cosmic egg and different parts of his body form different parts of our universe.  For example, his limbs become the mountains, and his two eyes become the sun and the moon.  And guess what part of his body becomes mankind?  His parasites!

Painting of P'an Ku from Google Images

Extend:

This week I used one of the resources from the module right away.  Since we are studying the periodic table, I showed the TD videos about the origins of the elements.  It was a little over the heads of some of my 7th graders, but many of them thought it was pretty neat to think about how they "came from a star".

Soon I plan on also using the video showing how a person's infrared image disappears when a tube of CO2 is put between him and the camera.  That was a great visual to show how CO2 absorbs heat.  I think I will fit this in when we talk about the electromagnetic spectrum.

Evaluate:

"What you burn in your car today shows up in Antarctica by next year."  What if we took this statement from from the module and replaced the word Antarctica with the word Alaska?  Would it still be accurate?  I think so.  All of the climate change information is so very relevant to us in Alaska.  Alaskans will be disproportionately affected by climate change in the future, especially those in rural Alaska. 

I was excited that La’ona DeWilde is using her mapping knowledge in her job to develop citizen scientists in the villages.  She seems like a great role model.  Now there will be databases for things like water quality monitoring where there previously was no data.  This is what we need more of everywhere, not just villages, and with kids as well as adults.  When kids participate in projects such as this, they see themselves as scientists and help break down the stereotype of a scientist being an old crazy-haired white guy in a lab coat holding a test tube.  By the way, if you live in southcentral and interior Alaska you can get involved in a citizen scientist program involving the wood frog.

Wood frog from ADFG website

Other Blogs I Commented On:

Dave shared an experiment he is doing with his 6th graders involving pH, phytoplankton, and microscopic animals in ocean water.
Doug shared the observations of elders in Tuluksak who commented on the rising winter temperatures over the years.
Kathy suggested the book The Whale and the Supercomputer, which seems like it will be a great read.  I just picked it up.

Module VI

Explain:

Ahh, memories . . . this week's module brought me back to my freshman year in college some twenty years ago.  I entered college as an atomopheric science (meteorology) major.  After a year and a half I realized that most meteorologists sit in front of computers and maps all day, and I would much rather be outside experiencing the weather than inside predicting it.  Long story short, I changed my major to biology and here I am. 

Anyway, many of the concepts like air pressure, jet stream, and atmospheric structure were things that I had learned and could actually remember from college - wow!  However, the relationship between atmospheric conditions and pollution was eye opening.  I had never heard of arctic haze before.  I didn't realize that pollution will sit during sunless winter months in the arctic because sunlight is the main driver of chemistry in the atmosphere.  I found further information on arctic haze from Siberian smoke in an article by Ned Rozell, my favorite Alaskan science writer.

I was saddened to learn in the TD videos that Alaska Natives as well as subsistence hunters in other countries are being told not to eat certain mammals or fish because of high levels of contaminants.  They're just supposed to stop what they’ve been doing for thousands of years because of what people in industrial population centers thousands of miles away have done?  I was not aware that the pollutants could travel so far.

Extend:

The YouTube video where ice was made after boiling water in a vacuum dome was neat.  I'm certain I'll show that one to my students.  At the end, the narrator said this process is often used in the pharmaceutical and food packing industries, but he didn’t elaborate.  I googled around a little, looking to connect it to prescriptions the kids take or food they eat, as a way to make the science relevant to them.

I ended up sort of off on a tangent, learning about vacuum distillation and its use in the refining of crude oil.  It's a little complex for 7th grade, but it's good to know, especially with the importance of the oil industry here in Alaska.

Evaluate:

Usually when I evaluate the week's module I feel I am doing so from a professional standpoint, wearing my "teacher hat".  This week I found myself reflecting on the module more personally rather than professionally.  I couldn't help but keep thinking back to the town where I grew up in Wisconsin.

Google Earth view of the Fox River from the College Ave. bridge

My hometown of Kimberly was originally built as a company town for a paper mill (Kimberly-Clark).  The banks of the river it sits next to, the Fox River, are dotted with many other mill towns.  When I was a kid, no one swam, fished, or boated in the river, and I never really questioned why.  The river was just this thing I saw when we drove over it on the bridge.  I had no connection to it.

As I got older, I learned that no one went in the river or ate fish from it because of the PCB pollution from the paper mills.  Eventually it was designated as an EPA Superfund site.  Dredging has been going on for years in the river to remove hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of contaminated sediment.

I feel emotional about this issue, but I'm not sharing this simply as a tale of woe.  The mills are still in operation and have cleaned up their act somewhat.  I realize that people need paper and that the economy in those towns is somewhat dependent on the mills.  However, I do think this story is relevant for people who live along rivers in Alaska.

As the TD videos have shown, many Alaska Natives are intricately connected to their rivers.  But that connection will be weakened if food from those rivers is no longer safe to eat.  There is already concern over how much fish should be consumed by Alaskans due to levels of mercury.  There is even a fish consumption calculator for women and children, along with a lot of other useful information, on the State of Alaska Epidemiology webpage  (look for this icon):

I know that Alaskan rivers don't have the concentration of industry along them that rivers in the Midwest do.  Thank goodness.  But as we learned in this module, pollutants can travel a long way through the atmosphere.  I would hate for there to be Alaskan kids someday who no longer had a connection to a river that was right in their own backyard, like I did.  And as the saying goes, we all live downstream.

Other Blogs I Commented On:

Martha had a commentary on village garbage dumps like the one in Barrow and the pollution they
 contribute.

Marilyn's blog had an informative diagram of a beluga whale that showed what pollutants it carried in its tissues and where they were concentrated.

Tracy shared a visual for understanding the chinook wind as well as how the chinook has affected her farm in North Pole.

Module V

Explain:

Sylvia Earle gave the quote, “We know more about Mars than we know about the oceans.”  That's pretty much how I felt when going through this week's module.  The previous modules have had cultural information that was new to me, but the science in them was mostly review.  This one, however, covered ocean topics that I knew very little about and I found myself fascinated.  Ocean conveyor belts?  Thermohaline circulation?  I had never heard of these, and I listened intently to the audio clip on Teachers' Domain from NPR.

Oceans are the earth’s big heat bucket – they are absorbing 80-90% of the heat returned by global warming.  Wow.  I haven't spent much time in or around the ocean, so I often forget its importance as related to global climate change.

After reading the link on ocean gyres, I saw the "see also" link to something called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.  Huh?

Apparently there are plastics, chemicals, and other debris that have been trapped in the North Pacific Gyre and they encompass an area estimated to be at least the size of the state of Texas.  I found more information on a NOAA website that answers many questions about marine debris.  This was all new to me and brought up questions in my mind about plastics, recycling, and the effects of pollution on marine species.

On the topic of marine species, this module also reminded me that Alaska Natives can provide information about numbers of ocean species because they have observed the patterns their whole lives.  They can help Western science and scientists, who may have only observed an area or a population for a much shorter period of time.  Western science needs their knowledge.

Extend:

I appreciated the "blabs" that were incorporated into this week's module.  The colored ice cube experiment would work great in my middle school science classroom.  With every year that I teach, I am trying to add more and more inquiry-based activities into what I do.  As we try to increase our students' STEM knowledge, inquiry is a must.

The air-filled vs. water-filled balloon demo would be an excellent visual for teaching heat capacity.  I also was intrigued by "Science on a Sphere" from NOAA.   The new Imaginarium in the Anchorage Museum has something similar to this, as seen in the picture below.  If you have a chance you should check it out.

Evaluate:

Being so busy with work and family doesn’t give me much time to read science-related books or magazines to learn something new.  But I really do enjoy it, and I enjoyed getting a chance to learn what was in this module.  It made me reflect on being a student rather than a teacher.  The excitement that I feel when I learn something new and cool is what I want my students to feel as well.  I know they’re not going to be all “ooh, aah!” every single day in class.  However, it’s a reminder to me to try and keep up my energy and enthusiasm for science as a teacher even as school district decisions try to drag me down.  I think science is awesome and I want my students to think so too.  The audio, video, and images on Teachers Domain and YouTube from this module can help keep some of them engaged in a way that a textbook cannot.

Other blogs I commented on:

Dan stresses the importance of using visual aids.

Cheryl's post includes a link to ALISON, the Alaska Lake Ice and Snow Observatory Network.  Neat!

Doug has a cool video from YouTube of divers going through a halocline.